People commonly access and exchange various types of information between devices connected via a network. A common example of a public network is the Internet. People have access to seemingly endless quantities of information on the World Wide Web (Web) via the Internet. Using a Web browser on a computing device, a person may view a document, or Web page, that contains any amount of text, images, audio, video, and other media. To view a Web page, a person typically begins by entering a uniform resource locator (URL) associated with the desired Web page into a Web browser, or by following a hypertext link to the Web page. In either situation, the Web browser establishes a connection with the server and requests the content of the Web page from the corresponding Web server. All text, images, video, audio, and other media associated with the requested Web page are retrieved and used by the Web browser to render the Web page.
In many cases, content that is retrieved or accessed by a person over a network includes information in the form of text, images, video, audio, and other media that is secondary to the desired information. For example, a person might enter a URL into a Web browser, or click on a hypertext link, in order to read textual information about a desired subject. In many instances, the resulting Web page will include not only the desired textual information, but also secondary information such as advertisements, images, videos, and unrelated articles or text. This secondary information is often rendered with the Web page for a payment to the primary entity associated with the Web page. The network service provider that provides the party requesting the Web page with access to the Internet does not receive any direct benefit for providing the secondary information with the requested Web page.